TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

BOOK NOTE: Occupy’s David Graeber on “Debt”! Todd on CNBC! Dionysium!

Catch me on CNBC’s Google+ stream as I do a video chat with John Carney and
Occupy Wall Street supporters tomorrow (Thur.) at 4pm Eastern!

And after yesterday’s historic May Day protests, it is time
I examined a few books tied to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Taking the place of my old “Books of the Month,” entries
like this one will henceforth focus on books that may relate to or help enrich the
discussion at that month’s Dionysium, the Dionysium being the new
series of bar events (a varying mix of debates, entertainment, and more) I’ll
be hosting (and moderating!) in Williamsburg – and this being a “Month of Political Crisis” on this
blog and at the Dionysium itself (followed by a June month of Revolution
and Revolutionaries at our sister Dionysium in Austin, TX).

(The Williamsburg action all starts at 8pm on Thursday, May 17, on the residential second floor of 2 Havemeyer
St., the building that will soon house the bar Muchmore’s, three blocks
east of the Bedford Ave. subway stop – first stop into Brooklyn on the L; enter
through the N. 9th St. side door just before you reach Havemeyer. First up is BRIAN DOHERTY discussing his new book on Ron Paul – but today let us examine how the left’s most interesting insurgent
movement thinks.)

•••

The Nietzschean skepticism inherent in the Dionysium demands
the questioning of clichés (as does the
new Jonah Goldberg book out yesterday, by the way). Let us then question the assumption that
Occupy and the Tea Party must be opposites.

I’ve leaned toward the more free-market Tea Party,
obviously, but then, some of my fellow libertarians have lately been arguing
that I should think more in terms of “social justice,” the way the left and
Occupy do (though I was pleased to see Jacob
Levy break ranks with the other liberal-tarians for the interesting reason
that he sees thinkers like Rawls as inviting people to think in closed, nationalistic,
non-cosmopolitan terms – of a single, self-contained society like an idealized
Greek city-state, not coincidentally – and thus to downplay the plight of
immigrants and outsiders).

I readily concede both that the basic concern for the poor
emphasized by the “social justice” crowd is admirable and that Occupy makes some very
good points about unfair corporate bailouts and government-banking
collusion. I will even concede that
radically-skewed wealth distribution can be a warning sign (though not necessarily a sign of excessively free-market rules).

On the other hand, having a few good points doesn’t entirely
absolve Occupy of the (admittedly shallow) charges made by their critics that
they’re a bunch of scruffy, trespassing, Marxist loonies. Many are.
Check out Gerard Perry’s tweets
from May 1 for a bit of Zuccotti flavor.
A related photo essay (one in a series Gerard’s done about Occupy) is
forthcoming on his site American-Rattlesnake.

Somewhere between the mundane, true points the movement
makes and the scruffy schizophrenics sleeping in the street in the name of that
movement lie the intelligent – but still sometimes bizarre – intellectuals who guide
the movement, and it’s mostly them I want to talk about today (and perhaps
tomorrow on Google+’s CNBC stream at 4pm Eastern, of course!).

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

I don’t know how many of the protesters at Occupy rallies
have read Debt by left-anarchist
anthropologist David Graeber, but he was purportedly instrumental in guiding
them toward their quasi-leaderless, General Assembly-forming,
amorphously-collective, ambiguously-agendaed system.

Graeber is full of interesting tidbits about how the
accounting of debts and the use of currency arose in real history instead of
the imagined/deduced scenarios of economists (as with most of history, the real
story seems to have been strange, messy, brutal, and not altogether
rational). But that doesn’t make his
political program wise – and if it’s shared by Occupiers in general,
civilization is in big trouble.

Graeber seems to want not just loan cancellation or

tax
hikes but the abolition of money. Long
story short: fully human friendships do not involve miserly keeping track of
who owes what to whom – so we should literally stop doing that (you can imagine
the chaos without too much help from me, I hope). It’s funny how the left can keep finding new
ways to repackage communism and (so to speak) sell it back to itself.

Graeber basically thinks that since barter was never really common in any society but
collective resource decisions were –
and coinage usually arose through some sort of chicanery, ritualism, or
conquest – then (by what seems to me about 400 pages worth of the genetic
fallacy) all money-based debt claims are morally invalid and dehumanizing. (But then, Napoleon’s conquests were crucial
in spreading the metric system, and I’d say that doesn’t make the number 10
oppressive.)

If you’re ever at University of London and meet up for
drinks with Graeber after an anarchism colloquium or something, my thinking is
that you shouldn’t let him exit without paying for his portion of dinner.

Graeber seems to want a rejection of money, accounting, and
debt altogether in favor of a “gift economy” (as he describes here,
sounding pretty Aspy), pointing to family-like village life as proof that
currency and accounting were foisted on us in a scam. Good luck with that, as they say. I predict the more likely result of the whole
Occupy effort will just be: higher taxes. (I’m amazed, really, that the Democrats
haven’t tried harder to co-opt the movement for that timely purpose.)

Graeber is also literally a Wobbly – that is, a member of
the Industrial Workers of the World socialist organization/union. That means that after a hundred years of
Soviets, Nazis, welfare state expansion, and the American global military
presence, we’re still back to: the Wobblies and anarchists fighting against the
corporations, down on Wall Street, while the Progressives think central
government can fix things. Should we have just skipped the past hundred
years to save time, fer chrissakes?
(Sidenote: Even the Wobblies themselves do not know the origin of the
term “Wobbly.”)

I kept thinking, as I read Debt, that if Graeber were logically consistent (or just very Aspy,
which I increasingly think amounts to about the same thing) he ought to go all
the way and denounce math by the end of the book, and with his final rant about
the dehumanizing effects of calculation, he basically does – and for a capper
asks why we place so much emphasis on individuals avoiding laziness and
unproductive activity anyway. This book
is basically the opposite of Aaron Sorkin’s Moneyball,
in which being the young Yale-educated math whiz trumps being a stodgy,
traditionalistic, intuitive thinker (good thing I didn’t realize Jonah Hill,
the guy playing the math whiz role in that movie, was the same guy who created
the annoying animated series Allen
Gregory or I would have enjoyed it less).

Say what you will about the Tea Party, at least it can do
math (and can see, for instance, that $15 trillion in debt doesn’t add up to
anything good). We need calculation for
utility – but I’ll make another concession: As recent psychological tests
suggest and Graeber no doubt concurs, the natural
calculators are often sociopathic (the UK documentarian Adam Curtis, a man
after Graeber’s heart, goes so far as to suggest that game theory is basically
a scam, turning us all – especially political thinkers and businessmen – into
paranoid schizophrenics by teaching us to calculate self-interest, as if we
wouldn’t have done that anyway, but more sloppily). The trick is to get the calculators to want to
calculate their way to general happiness, and get the emoters to think a bit
more numerically and rationally.

Graeber’s right,
though, that there are situations in which calculation seems
inappropriate. It would be odd and
alienating if your mother offered you a dish of candy and then handed you a
bill for the two pieces you took. And
Graeber is halfway to the truth, I think, when he observes that we use
different modes of thought – calculation, communal ties, political power – in
different spheres. My conclusion is that
different modes of thought may be appropriate
to different spheres of life, and that to try turning all political and
economic transactions into cozy conversations with the members of your
household will not work.

You can’t switch
willy-nilly between modes, but in intimate enough, trusting enough settings,
where all local conditions are known well enough to all those involved, you can
get away with ditching the numerical record-keeping. Or, as an economics professor friend of mine
said when I told her about Graeber’s vision: “Yes, we’d all live like friends
in an ancient village – and be very poor.”

I know how cruelly dismissive
it sounds, but given the resentment against numbers and rational calculation at
the heart of Occupy, it’s not surprising that their encampments devote a
significant portion of their energy to “mental health counseling.” I don’t say that as an insult. They report it themselves.

Perhaps Graeber would even agree with one left-wing friend
of mine who says that there are no laws
of economics. Well, in some sense, that’s right, if you mean laws in the
sense of physics – but the laws of economics are highly-probabilistic (much
like laws of gas behavior, or at least, not coincidentally, like zoologists’
descriptions of animal behavior). That
is to say, for example, that everyone could
in theory get up tomorrow morning and seek self-punishing, high-priced goods
instead of lower-priced goods of the same quality – but what are the odds of
that happening absent some extraneous
factor that market-oriented analysts would as happily factor in as would the
anti-market advocates?

Do you think something becoming rarer – but still being as
beloved as before – will tend to make
its price go up or not? That’s about all
free-market economists are saying, not that humans must unquestioningly submit
to any particular legal regime – though it’s easier to recognize most proposed non-property legal regimes as
socially-destructive once you take the insights of basic econ into account. (And rule-utilitarians are more likely to be
comfortable with this probabilistic view of life than deontologists and
metaphysicians whether left or right, I suspect.)

In any case, I sympathize with Graeber wanting to live in a
world characterized by friendship and trust, but trust usually means not altering deals without warning – at
least not unilaterally. And one party to
a contract declaring debts null and void is surely the unilateral changing of
an agreement. Have Graeber et al
seriously considered the possibility that the “sociality” he so highly values
entails, in part, being able to make binding contracts – and that the more
universal and open-ended the system of trust, the more it requires simple, consistent,
abstract rules? Friendship works with
friends, but contracts, miraculous things that they are, work even with distant
strangers.

Graeber’s quite the conservative if he really wants to avoid
reliance on general abstract principles and go back to village life when we all
knew everything about each other and all the resources at hand. Whatever happened to the days when the left
liked rational things like the metric system?
Are we all supposed to be some combo of Dadaists, Frankfurt School
students, and Amazonian tribesmen now?
That’s a tall order.